From the category archives:

BPM

Adding more intelligence to business process

February 2, 2009

Jim Sinur posted BPM Needs to Add More Intelligence to Decisions Surrounding Processes and said:
Going forward, I see a need for more sophisticated decisions that will require a deeper integration of rules, analytics, and complex events.
If you read my blogs, you know I agree with this statement in broad terms. I think, however, that the [...]

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IBM and ILOG – Thoughts on Jerry Cuomo’s WebSphere Top 10

January 24, 2009

Jerry Cuomo has been talking about WebSphere in 2009 and he published his top 10 list on his blog  WebSphere: Into the wild BLUE yonder!.

Business Mash-ups
Business Rules
Middleware-as-a-Service
Rainmaker
Extreme Scale
WAS.NEXT
Restful – Agile
DataPower-lution
POWERful Middleware
Industry-savvy Middleware

He expanded this list with some additional thoughts in an article on InfoQ. Serveral of these – business mash=ups, business rules, Middleware-as-a-Service and Agile [...]

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IBM and ILOG – Simpler, more agile processes

January 21, 2009

I am going to be attending ILOG’s DIALOG ‘09 user group next month and I thought I would build up to it by posting my thoughts on some of the opportunities IBM has as it integrates ILOG’s technology into its product portfolio. Today is the first one in this series – the opportunity to use [...]

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Predictions for 2009

December 18, 2008

I just went back to check and found no predictions on the blog for 2008 (so I get a 100% accuracy rating with no errors) so I thought I would make some for 2009. In no particular order then:

Cloud computing will impact decision management.
There are already at least two decision management vendors offering decisions in [...]

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Customer Centricity Strategy #2 – Process Integration

December 17, 2008

Continuing my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Process Integration. John describes this as focusing on cross-channel integration using Enterprise Service Bus/SOA technologies to bring data to the point of interaction. Decision management, of…

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First Look – Intalio Business Edition

December 9, 2008

I got an update from Ishmael Ghalimi at Intalio this week. I have blogged about Intalio a few times, including a set of posts from their user group – check out the intalio tag. Intalio is a company built on a variant of the open source model with 80% of their code in open source, [...]

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Business Rules, Decisions and Processes

December 5, 2008

Mike Kavtiz wrote a nice post on Agile SOA: Empower the Business with Business Rules Engines. One of the things his post shows, however, is that business process notations don’t do a good job with decisions. Mike has to annotate his diagram to show where he used rules. He could have considered one or more [...]

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Business Event Management and Decisions

December 4, 2008

There has been another flurry of posts around event processing and event management recently. IBM recently announced Business Event Management about which the architect guy had this feedback, Carole-Ann posted An attempt at demystifying CEP, BPM and BRMS and Eric Roch replied with EDA, CEP, BPM, BRMS and SOA. This is also a topic on [...]

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First Look – Savvion 7.5

November 11, 2008

I got a quick overview of Savvion 7.5 this week. Savvion is one of the pure-play BPM vendors with customers in Telecommunications, Media, Financial Services and Manufacturing (along with some retail and healthcare). They released version 7.5 at the end of September.
Savvion has recently been investing in domain-specific vertical solutions built on their horizontal [...]

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The Technology of Decision Management

November 4, 2008

I just wrote an article for BPM Institute on The Technology of Business (Enterprise) Decision Management. It’s short but, if you want more, Neil and I are working on a multi-vendor study of the technology for decision management that we should have available really soon…

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Live from the EDM Summit – From Here to Agility

October 28, 2008

I am at the EDM Summit this week and will be blogging live from some of the sessions and posting random thoughts and comments in addition. Despite the difficult market conditions, attendance looks good with a nice full room for the keynote and attendees from 17 countries. This year’s event also has a dozen new [...]

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How many different kinds of decision management are there?

October 21, 2008

Well at least one more as of today – Jim Sinur, over on his Gartner blog – has finally started to use the phrase he has been threatening to use for a while “Intelligent Decision Management”. While Jim has not published a formal definition – I expect he will soon now he is back at [...]

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Decision Services, Decision Agents and Event Processing

October 13, 2008

I have been doing some presenting on decision services recently – to SAI in Belgium and at the SOA Symposium – and my old friend Paul Vincent posted about a discussion he and I have been having about the relevance of decision services in an event-driven architecture or Complex Event Processing scenario. Paul makes the [...]

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Finding hidden decisions in business processes

September 24, 2008

Scott Sehlhorst (with whom I have presented and about whom I have written before) had a great post this week called Hidden Business Rule Example. Scott walks through some analysis of a process and shows how finding hidden decisions within that process can really inform how you think about the systems and processes you need. [...]

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What if someone with a lower pay grade were to do this?

September 11, 2008

Patrick Joseph Gauthier wrote a great post this week called “Business Process Reengineering: The Right Skills And Roles For The Task Will Save You  Money” and I loved the question he suggests (that gave me the title for this post):
“what if someone with a lower pay grade were to do this?”
He goes on to make [...]

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Decisions matter to Complex Event Processing

September 5, 2008

An old colleague asked me to explain a little about the difference between Complex Event Processing or CEP and decision management. In particular he referenced a recent series of articles by James Kobelius in which the last one (titled Really Happy in Real Time) discussed how “Complex event processing empowers the contact center to manage [...]

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A reader asks about business rules in Oslo

August 11, 2008

A reader asked me last week about how I saw business rules engines fitting in with UML, SOA and Microsoft. The article discusses whether Microsoft’s Oslo strategy for SOA will be based on UML or merely offer support for it among many standards.
First, let me say that I think it is increasingly clear that application [...]

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More on the IBM/ILOG Relationship

August 11, 2008

I got a briefing last week from IBM as part of my researching of the IBM/ILOG acquisition (I blogged about this here). Back when I was at IMPACT it became clear that IBM was getting focused on events, rules and policies – they talked about Points of Agility, points in a business where variability is [...]

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First Look – IDS Scheer ARIS Business Rule Designer

August 8, 2008

I had a chance to catch up with Marwane from IDS Scheer the other day and talk about ARIS, IDS Scheer’s enterprise modeling product. The ARIS architecture or platform has currently more than 25 products for enterprise modeling divided into 4 platforms (Strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and 6 solutions (Enterprise BPM, EA, SAP, [...]

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